Jetty/Troubleshooting

Big Problems

Why isn't my application/servlet/content served?

To diagnose the problem:

• If you think your application is running, but you get a 404 response, make sure that you have correctly set the context path.

• If you are clicking a link to access the application, make sure you don't have a relative URL problem. Remember that a link to foo/bar on a page at /myapp/page goes to /myapp/foo/bar. If you want it to go to /myapp/page/foo/bar, make sure the browser is redirected from /myapp/page to /myapp/page/.

• If you still cannot get your content, look in the requestlog to see the exact URL that is being requested.

• If you receive a 503 Unavailable response, an exception occurred while deploying the web application. Check the log for details.

Jetty has locked up?

If your requests are not getting any responses, a frequent description of the problem is that "jetty locked up." To diagnose such problems, it is very important to work out exactly what has locked up.

• You can test whether the JVM has locked up completely by trying to use a tool like Jconsole or jvisualvm to attach to the process.

• • If you cannot attach to the process, it is likely something has gone wrong with the JVM and/or the operating system rather than Jetty itself.

• • If you can attach to the JVM with Jconsole and/or jvisualvm, look to see how many threads are allocated and what tasks they are doing. A frequent cause of lockups is a slow database so that all the threads in the thread pool end up waiting for a JDBC connection from the connection pool.

• You can test whether Jetty is completely locked up by trying some simple requests to see if they get a response. Hitting http://thehost.com/favicon.ico or some other image directly is often a good way to see if Jetty is still running. If it is, try some simple requests within the application that use minimal features (no authentication, no database, for example) and see if any of those requests work.

• Finally, you can use telnet as a fake HTTP client to see if connections are being accepted. If you telnet to the port (80 or 8080) and you see a "Connected to www.example.com" message, Jetty is still accepting connections. Next try typing a request like "OPTION * HTTP/1.0" and press Enter twice to see if you get an HTTP response:

   # telnet blogs.webtide.com 80
   Trying 72.32.76.94...
   Connected to blogs.webtide.com.
   Escape character is '^]'.
   OPTION * HTTP/1.0
   HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
   Cache-Control: must-revalidate,no-cache,no-store
   Content-Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1
   Content-Length: 1287
   Server: Jetty(7.0.0.v20091005)
   

Check that the Server in the response field is Jetty (and not a load balancer, etc.).

Doing tests like these helps narrow down exactly which component has locked up. Getting a thread dump (with jstack or ctl-\ or jvisualvm) is also invaluable to diagnose what the threads are doing.

JSP support not configured?

JSP is an option for Jetty. The jars need to be present in the lib/jsp directory, but currently the JSP jars are not distributed with the jetty@eclipse download (soon will be), but they are available as part of the jetty@codehaus jetty-hightide download. Secondly, the JSP option needs to be specified for the start.jar command line.

If JSP is not correctly configured then each context started will produce an error message like:

INFO::NO JSP Support for /, did not find org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet

A request to a JSP will generate a 500 response with the message "500 JSP support not configured"

Why does StressTest.java fail on Mac OS?

StressTest in jetty-server might fail on Mac OS X due to an insufficient port range. Most operating systems have a limit of 65535 available TCP/IP ports.

Read the following wikipedia entry for details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeral_port

[...]The IANA suggests 49152 to 65535 as "dynamic and/or private ports.[...]

[...]Many Linux kernels use 32768 to 61000.[...]

We have fixed the test code to make it run successfully on Mac OS. If it nonetheless fails on your Mac OS, raise the port range by executing the following two commands in a terminal:

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.ip.portrange.first=32768
sudo sysctl -w net.inet.ip.portrange.hifirst=32768

It seems that Apple raised the limits for Mac OS Lion, so on Lion it should work from scratch. If not, apply the sysctl commands and retry.

Logs and Warnings

Why do I get JVM Bugs reported?

Yes! There are several NIO bugs in the JVM (specially for linux) that will not be fixed in the 1.6.x series. Jetty has implemented a number of JVM NIO Bug work arounds that keep a jetty server working efficiently in the presence of these problems.

Why do I get a "Save could not be completed" error in Eclipse whenever I try to save a file while Jetty is running?

This is a limitation of Windows -- having a file open in one process means that you can't write to that same file with another process. Since Jetty has mapped the file to its cache, which prevents the file from being edited, you'll need to turn off caching to work around the problem. You can turn off caching in the default servlet by setting <useFileMappedBuffer> to false in webdefault.xml.